I’ve seen some pretty strange business practices in my lifetime, but the recent one from our credit card company has to take the cake.

The company, for some reason, recently decided to upgrade our card. I’m not sure why or what the upgrade amounts to, but they did it anyway.

In taking this step, they cut us new cards and mailed them out.

Now normally, when a company does something like this, you simply use the current card until the new one arrives and you activate it — if that is what you want to do.

But these idiots cancelled our current card.

So here we are, the cards in our wallets are no good, and the new ones haven’t arrived.

Well, that prompted a call, or should I say calls, from my wife.

After several minutes of going through the computer prompts, she finally got a human being on the line.

Yes, that person told her the new cards were in the mail and the current one had been cancelled, all the time playing up the fact that we were to receive an upgrade and what a wonderful thing that was.

Those poor people never saw it coming once my wife got a hold of them.

I wasn’t there for the earlier calls, but I was present when she called back Wednesday night with more questions about this. I don’t think the guy on the other end of the phone had too many opportunities to speak. He spent most of the call listening to Martha.

And when it was all said and done, after she had all her questions answered, and had had an opportunity to speak her mind on this, nothing had really changed. Nothing, that is, except she convinced them to provide us some sort of compensation for the inconvenience.

So, I sit here today with a credit card I can’t use, and a new one mailed from Richmond that will take up to five days to arrive. I could have driven up there and collected the new cards and been home in half a day.

I wonder if there is now a red flag on our file at the credit card company? “Warning, don’t mess with these folks again. I mean it!”

The election

Well, they’re at it again.

In all the TV and radio ads I’ve seen and heard for the upcoming election, I haven’t heard one candidate say what he or she stands for or will do if re-elected or elected.

All I am hearing is verbal shots taken at the opponents — he/she did this or didn’t do that, etc.

It’s hard enough to select one person to represent us at any level, but it’s even harder to do when you have no idea what their plans are for our future.

What’s that outside?

How about that story from the space shuttle — unidentified object following it through space, delaying its return to Earth by one day.

My wife and I have theories on what it was.

She thinks it was Pluto, hitching a ride on the shuttle’s gravitational pull in order to realign itself closer to Earth and maybe being reinstated as a planet.

I, on the other hand, think it was the keys to the shuttle, left on the hood of the vehicle when the astronauts were making a space walk, and then forgotten once they went back inside.

But, like most drivers, the pilot likely had a spare set in his wallet, or in one of those little metal boxes with a magnet on the outside, hidden safely away under the fender.

Don’t come out of that tunnel

Did you now that it is, from what I have heard, not illegal to dig a tunnel under the United States border? It is, however, illegal, once you crawl through, to exit said tunnel on the U.S. side.

How strange is that?

Grant is the managing editor of the News-Herald. Contact him at doug.grant@suffolknewsherald.com or 934-9603